The air had grown heavy with the scent of the sea. I could nearly taste it, curling through the warm throne room like a tentacle.

It filled me with an upending sort of dread.

Guests poured in from the entry hall, their tittering and chatter pinging off the marble, but I clung to the outer edges, closer to the bone-white walls. I’d done so well keeping away. I’d spent my life ignoring the lure of the sea, only for it to slink past Fort Linum’s defenses on the silks and fine wools of the long-traveled guests like an insidious stowaway.

“Imogen?” Agatha came to my side, studying me with sharp, worried eyes. She looked much the same as she had when she had been my teenage governess and I had been a girl of six. Impossibly youthful, warm brown skin, curls as shiny and dark as the ink in a pot. Soft lines did not even crease the high edges of her cheekbones, but I supposed one must smile often to earn them. “What’s wrong? You’re pale.”

“It’s the dress.” I set a hand to my sternum, where a deep fluttering had started. “It’s too damn tight. Will you loosen the laces?”

Her look turned raw with frustration. “They’re not long enough. I don’t understand why you agreed to wear this awful thing.” She adjusted the ruffle at my shoulder, shaking her head. “How you agreed to marry a man whose job it is to hunt and kill —”

“Agatha, please.” I kept my attention on the room — the food-laden tables, the flickering candles, the cups filled with wine. “Not now.”

“Then when? The wedding is in two days.”

“I’m aware.” When I met her gaze, there was a desperation in it that twisted my insides. “You know that I wasn’t given a choice.”

Tense, she scanned the throne room, then leaned in close. “We could leave,” she whispered. “We should have left years ago. There might be a way —”

I grabbed her by the hand and dragged her around the head table, into a tight, shadowed alcove. “Agatha, enough.” Her brown eyes were wide and searching, as faceted as polished wood. “Please. I beg you to stop condemning me for trying to make the best of this situation. I’ve done well keeping myself safe here, haven’t I? I will continue to. I must.”

Disappointment stooped her shoulders, but her voice filled with a cutting edge. “If this marriage, and the misery it will bring you, doesn’t make you see that you do not belong here . . . I have little hope that anything will.”

I wanted to tip back my chin so I might appear sure. So that she might think me as brave and hardy as she was. But I was no such thing. “That’s unfair of you.” I sounded ground down and soft. “Where would I go?”

She threw up her hands, exasperated. “Well, I suppose we’ll never know now, will we?”